Intimate partner violence is two times more likely to occur in two income households, compared to those where only one partner works, according to a new study.

Conducted by Sam Houston State University researchers Cortney A. Franklin, Ph.D., and doctoral student Tasha A. Menaker and supported by the Crime Victims’ Institute, the study looked at the impact of education levels and employment among heterosexual partners as it relates to domestic violence.

While the researchers found that differences in education levels appeared to have little influence, when both partners were working, intimate partner violence increased.

“When both male and females were employed, the odds of victimization were more than two times higher than when the male was the only breadwinner in the partnership, lending support to the idea that female employment may challenge male authority and power in a relationship,” said the researchers.

The study was based on telephone interviews with 303 women who identified themselves as either currently or recently in a serious romantic relationship.

[…]The study found that more than 60 percent of women in two-income couples reported victimization, while only 30 percent of women reported victimization in cases when only the male partner was employed.

[…]The study is scheduled to be published in the journal Violence Against Women.

Dr. Schneiderman comments:

To the best of my knowledge the research does not show whether the wives in question were using their income as a way to diminish and disrespect their husbands.

Feminism has long been claiming that the male role of provider or breadwinner is a social construct designed to oppress women. If, however, the role is instinctive, and if it is intrinsic to male pride, then the feminist derogation of it is a losing fight.

In my own case, I would never, ever ever marry a woman who expected to work at all if there were children under 5 in the home. What a woman does in marriage is care for her husband and her children. If she is dismissive of the needs of men and children, then marriage is not for her. That’s why it is so important to talk to women about what they believe marriage is, why they want to get married, and why they want to have children. Ask them what the needs of men are in a marriage. Ask them what the needs of children are through their development. What is her plan for her husband and children? How does she intend to achieve those plans? What decisions has she made to prepare? What actions has she performed to show where her priorities lie?

Marriage is not just whatever people decide marriage is. It’s the joining together of two opposite sexual natures, and there are rules and guidelines about how to do that. It is a tense, close-quarters situation that requires that both parties understand that the sexes are different and have different needs. A man has to make certain choices and perform certain actions to fuel his wife and keep her engaged. And a woman has to make certain choices and perform certain actions to fuel her husband and keep him engaged. You can’t have a real marriage with a feminist who repudiates sex differences and the obligations that natural marriage imposes on each partner. It’s fine if a woman says things like “I want to keep working after I get married” or “I will put my children in day care a few weeks after they are born”. All that means is that she isn’t qualified for marriage. Cohabitation is a better option, or maybe just hook-up sex, divorce, single motherhood and spinsterhood. Those are the options – either marriage or feminism.

Before we look at the statistics, here’s a news story about the issue.

Excerpt:

Police say a man was struck and killed by his girlfriend after a heated argument in the Grays Ferry section of Philadelphia.

At approximately 1:52 a.m., police received a call concerning the incident at Morris and Ringgold streets.

Upon arrival, officers observed the male victim, identified as 28-year-old Tyrone Taylor, lying against the wall with a woman standing next him.

The woman, 30-year-old Keisha Jones, identified herself as Taylor’s girlfriend and stated to the officers that she struck him with the vehicle.

Medics were called to the scene and pronounced Taylor, who was pinned against a home, dead.

Police say Taylor and Jones were involved in a verbal altercation which continued inside the vehicle.

Taylor was driving the vehicle at the time of the altercation; he then stopped and exited the vehicle at 2400 Morris Street.

After Taylor exited the vehicle, Jones told police she jumped in the driver’s seat and struck him.

The investigation continues and charges are pending.

Now let’s see the numbers.

What do the government studies say?

First of all, let’s see what’s happening with domestic violence rates in the UK.

Excerpt:

Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the last year for which figures are available. In 2006-07 men made up 43.4% of all those who had suffered partner abuse in the previous year, which rose to 45.5% in 2007-08 but fell to 37.7% in 2008-09.

Similar or slightly larger numbers of men were subjected to severe force in an incident with their partner, according to the same documents. The figure stood at 48.6% in 2006-07, 48.3% the next year and 37.5% in 2008-09, Home Office statistics show.

The 2008-09 bulletin states: “More than one in four women (28%) and around one in six men (16%) had experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16. These figures are equivalent to an estimated 4.5 million female victims of domestic abuse and 2.6 million male victims.”

In addition, “6% of women and 4% of men reported having experienced domestic abuse in the past year, equivalent to an estimated one million female victims of domestic abuse and 600,000 male victims”.

An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.

So it’s pretty even. Women are about as likely to commit violence as men are. And in lesbian relationships, the rate of domestic violence is extremely high, from 17% to 45%, depending on the study. I think in general, women are more violent when there is no man present, because they have more difficulty restraining their emotions and resolving disagreements with rational arguments instead of fist, feet and weapons.

So it’s not clear to me at all that men are the only ones who engage in violence and abuse. And we haven’t even talked about verbal abuse. I would imagine that women have a huge edge in that department.

Women are more likely than men to stalk, attack and psychologically abuse their partners, according to a University of Florida study that finds college women have a new view of the dating scene.

“We’re seeing women in relationships acting differently nowadays than we have in the past,” said Angela Gover, a UF criminologist who led the research. “The nature of criminality has been changing for females, and this change is reflected in intimate relationships as well.”

In a survey of 2,500 students at UF and the University of South Carolina between August and December 2005, more than a quarter (29 percent) reported physically assaulting their dates and 22 percent reported being the victims of attacks during the past year. Thirty-two percent of women reported being the perpetrators of this violence, compared with 24 percent of men. The students took selected liberal arts and sciences courses. Forty percent were men and 60 percent were women, reflecting the gender composition of these classes.

In a separate survey of 1,490 UF students, one quarter (25 percent) said they had been stalked during the past year and 7 percent reported engaging in stalking, of whom a majority (58 percent) were female.

Strangely enough, though, there is no Violence Against Men Act – just a Violence Against Women Act. And virtually no government funding goes to men’s shelters – it’s all for women. How can that be? And what incentives does this inequality create for men to either marry or not marry? When you put that together with the leniency shown to women who commit violence, it really starts to push marriage-minded men away from marriage.

Excerpt:

The Federal criminal sentencing guidelines struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 required that males and females who commit the same crime and have the same prior criminal record be sentenced equally. Using data obtained from the United States Sentencing Commission’s records, we examine whether there exists any gender-based bias in criminal sentencing decisions. We treat months in prison as a censored variable in order to account for the frequent outcome of no prison time. Additionally, we control for the self-selection of the defendant into guilty pleas through use of an endogenous switching regression model. A new decomposition methodology is employed. Our results indicate that women receive more lenient sentences even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history.

Finally, I want to point out that the out-of-wedlock birth rate is increasing, and that means more children raised without fathers. But children raised in fatherless homes are more likely to be violent. I expect the rate of violence among women to increase as more of them are raised without fathers. Fathers restrain the emotions of their wives and daughters – they act as a stabilizing influence. Even boys raised without fathers are more likely to be violent and to have run-ins with the police. You can’t replace a father with a welfare check from the government.

Stanford University is one of the top 5 universities in the United States.

Details:

Dr J gave this talk at Stanford University’s Anscombe Society on the reasons for marriage, and the ways in which it shapes society and the next generation. After Dr J’s talk at Stanford University, she took questions and answers from the students in attendance. They had quite the lively discussion… Please be advised–some of these questions may be overly explicit for very young listeners.

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the founder and President of the Ruth Institute, president of the Ruth Institute a project of the National Organization for Marriage to promote life-long married love to college students by creating an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage.

She is also the Senior Research Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

She is the author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, (2005) and Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work (2001), recently reissued in paperback, as Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

Dr. Morse served as a Research Fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1997-2005. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester in 1980 and spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago during 1979-80. She taught economics at Yale University and George Mason University for 15 years. She was John M. Olin visiting scholar at the Cornell Law School in fall 1993. She is a regular contributor to the National Review Online, National Catholic Register, Town Hall, MercatorNet and To the Source.

Dr. Morse’s scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, Economic Inquiry, the Journal of Economic History, Publius: the Journal of Federalism, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Social Philosophy and Policy, The Independent Review, and The Notre Dame Journal of Law Ethics and Public Policy.

[…]Her public policy articles have appeared in Forbes, Policy Review,The American Enterprise, Fortune, Reason, the Wall Street Journal, Vital Speeches, and Religion and Liberty.

She currently lives in San Diego, CA. She and her husband are the parents of a birth child, an adopted child. From March 2003 to August 2006, Dr. Morse and her husband were foster parents for San Diego County. During that time, they cared for a total of eight foster children.

Her talent is to apply the economic way of thinking to social issues like marriage, family and parenting.

I often tease women for being too focused on happiness and feelings, but Dr. J isn’t like that at all. She is all about economics, incentives, and moral boundaries. She thinks about the big issues. She once chastised me in an e-mail for being too emotional. I think she has had it with the feelings-based arguments from the socially-liberal left.

Keep in mind that this speech was given to Wisconsin Catholic seminarians, so there is a lot of rah-rah Catholic stuff. I’m an evangelical Protestant, so I just smile when she talks about that. At least there was no Mary in it. Yay!

SUMMARY

Contraception:
– contraception does not reduce the abortion rate
– contraception is bad because it makes sex a recreational activity
– contraception fails, which leads to the need for abortion
– 80% of abortions are done on unmarried women
– teenagers do not think that contraceptives will FAIL for them
– they don’t understand that the probabilities is PER ACTION – more actions increases probability
– the more you rely on something that has a small chance of failure, the more chance you will get a failure
– more sex, means more chances for a person to get a failure
– older women are naturally less fertile, so they skew contraceptive effectiveness figures higher
– contraceptives are most likely to fail for the young, the poor and the unmarried
– contraception means that women cannot ask men to promise to marry them before sex
– the pressure for a man to marry if the woman gets pregnant is gone
– the presumption is that the woman will have an abortion
– women who want to get married are at a disadvantage to get male attention now
– because men will prefer women who are willing to have an abortion if they get pregnant
– when people argue for these social changes, they don’t accurately assess consequences
– they think that they can have the happiness-making freedom without damaging anything else
– they think that no incentives will be created so that others start to act differently
– example: no-fault divorce – there were terrible consequences that were minimized by the social engineers

Divorce:
– people who wanted this believed myths in order to get the happiness-making freedom for the adults
– they said that divorce would be less harmful for children than if the parents stayed together
– they argued for no-fault divorce because they wanted happiness and didn’t care about children
– in a low conflict marriage, it is better for children if the parents stay together
– in a high-conflict marriage, it is better for children to divorce
– but for high-conflict divorce, you could have gotten a divorce for cause
– what people pushing no-fault divorce really wanted was to divorce to pursue happiness elsewhere
– there is also a financial incentive to divorce for no reason – alimony, child support, property
– but divorce really disrupts the lives of the children
– the VAST MAJORITY of divorces are in low-conflict situations
– the social norm was that low-level conflict meant that you stayed married for the sake of the kids
– a pregnancy after a re-marriage is devastating to children of the first marriage
– not being able to have a normal relationship with both biological parents is devastating to children
– what often drives people into co-habitation is the fear of screwing up their own marriages
– pro-divorce people want women to re-marry afterwards to provide kids with a “father-figure”
– the presence of a stepfather increases bad behavior in the kids, as well as risk of abuse
– but actually, stepfathers spend little time with kids, and draws mother away from the kids
– biological fathers spend the most time with the children
– disciplining the children is more complex with a non-bio dad
– normally, dads wants the kids to behave, and moms want the children to be happy
– often, the woman will forbid the father from disciplining the children
– the father will just drop out of parenting completely when his authority is not respected

Co-habitation:
– social engineers understate the risks of co-habitation and overstate the risks of marriage
– but research shows that co-habitation makes no positive contribution to marriage
– feminists love to say that marriage is very risky, but without comparing it to alternatives
(feminists don’t like marriage because of the “unequal gender roles”)
– when compared with the alternatives, like co-habitation, marriage is better on every measure
– feminists say that married women do not report abuse in marriage, that’s why marriage LOOKS better
– but murders HAVE TO BE reported, and co-habitation results in NINE TIMES more murders than marriage
– children are killed FIFTY TIMES more with co-habitation with an unrelated adult than with 2 bio-parents
– the live-in boyfriend is the culprit in 85% of these cases

Same-sex marriage:
– alternatives to marriage change rules and incentives, it is NOT the same thing as marriage
– necessarily, one of the parents will not have a close relationship with one bio-parents
– social engineers say that mothers and fathers are interchangeable – but they are different
– SSM undermines the presumption of paternity, and substitutes state-ordered parenting
– the public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers to fathers, and parents to children
– SSM elevates private purposes for marriage over and above the public purpose of marriage
– SSM will lead to fathers being marginalized from the family
– the state will have to force people to equate SSM and natural marriage

Artificial reproductive technology:
– it is the next substitute for marriage
– highly educated career women do not have to prepare for a husband to get a baby
– her behavior through her life changes because she doesn’t have to care about marriage

Dr. J the Shorter has a new technique where she weaves statistics into a story to show how bad things happen to people who don’t plan and prepare to have strong marriages. She’s got a new post up on her blog to show it off.

Excerpt:

Rather than regale the reader with statistics, let me tell the story of a hypothetical young woman named Lucy. Not all of the outcomes that happen to Lucy happen to each and every unmarried mother. Lucy’s story is a composite of the outcomes that are systematically more likely to happen to unmarried women, or to cohabiting women, than to married women. (I have omitted the hazards associated with drugs and alcohol, so as not to cloud the marriage issue.) Telling Lucy’s story illustrates what multiple partner fertility looks like in the lives of ordinary people of modest means.

Lucy has graduated from high school, has a job as a dental assistant, and lives with her boyfriend, Izzy. Lucy becomes pregnant. It isn’t entirely clear whether this is an “accidental” pregnancy. She has been on the Pill, but she missed one or two. (The failure rate for the Pill for low-income, cohabitating women younger than twenty is 48 percent.)44

Lucy is glad to be pregnant. She has always wanted to be a mother. Izzy isn’t so happy. He isn’t ready to be a father. Pregnancy was not part of the deal. He feels cheated. They quarrel frequently, and he sometimes hits her. (Domestic violence is more common in cohabiting couples than in married couples.)45

As her pregnancy proceeds, Lucy becomes less and less interested in sex, and Izzy becomes less and less interested in her. He has sex with a former girlfriend. (Cohabiting couples are more likely to have “secondary sex partners.”)46 He feels entitled, since he isn’t “getting any” from Lucy, and after all, she cheated him by becoming pregnant in the first place. They quarrel some more, and he moves out for a while. By the time baby Anna is born, Izzy has moved back in with Lucy.

Now Lucy isn’t so happy. In fact, she becomes depressed. (The presence of children increases a cohabiting woman’s probability of depression. Children do not affect a married woman’s probability of becoming depressed.)47 Izzy is caught up in the excitement for a while. But the combination of sleep deprivation, a needy infant, and a preoccupied and depressed Lucy are more than Izzy can handle. He moves out for good when Anna is six months old. (Cohabiting relationships are less stable than married relationships.)48 He never offers to contribute support to the care of Anna. (Never-married fathers are much less likely to pay child support than fathers who were once married to the child’s mother.)49 Lucy finds that she can’t handle the demands of her job and the care of her baby by herself. She goes to court to try to get Izzy to pay child support.

Then the stepfather Tom enters the picture so things get even more interesting, and it goes on like that with more bad things that happen to Lucy. I’ve never seen this story/statistics technique done before – I think it’s a really winsome way to make the point to people who are skeptical about statistics. I am so going to steal this technique when I talk about these things to young women who don’t understand what marriage is for, what a man does in a marriage, and what decisions a man makes all along his life in order to take on the man’s roles in a marriage.

If I told you what young women look for in men and what they think that men do in marriage, you would laugh your head off. Women today think that men are best if they are handsome and fun – and that’s all men are good for! No wonder the out-of-wedlock birth rate is 40% and the divorce rate is 50%! But I have confidence in Dr. J – she can fix all of these problems. She knows everything there is to know about men and marriage and children. Every time I read anything she has written about marriage, it gets me really enthusiastic about getting married.